Multitenant systems provide users with access to a suite of services including e-mail applications, calendar applications, word processing applications, spreadsheet applications, without the user having to install the applications locally on their device. This provides a user with the ability to use the suite of services on different devices, thereby preventing the user from being tethered to a single device. The suite of services may be accessible to the user through a user account. Oftentimes an organization manages the user account and several other user accounts. The organization may be referred to as a tenant, by an information technology (IT) company hosting the suite of services for the user account. The IT company may assign a domain to the tenant, which is used by user accounts internal to the organization, and user accounts external to the organization, when a message needs to be sent to user accounts internal to the organization.
If the organization merges with, or is acquired by, another company, the messages sent from user accounts within the organization to external user accounts need to reflect the domain of the pre-merger or pre-acquisition organization in some instances. In other instances, the messages need to reflect the domain of the post-merger or post-acquisition organization.
Organizations, large and small, are in a constant state of change. Mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures may be the driving force behind this change. When an organization is merged with another organization, or the organization is acquired by another organization, the information technology (IT) infrastructure of the organizations is usually consolidated. After the consolidation of the IT infrastructure of two organizations, the resulting IT infrastructure is oftentimes plagued with technological challenges that must be addressed by IT administrators. One challenge that IT administrators face is the process of migrating the user accounts (e.g., e-mail accounts, electronic calendar accounts, and other services offered by the premerger organization) from a tenant, or domain, that the user accounts belonged to before the merger, to a tenant, or domain, of the consolidated organization. This may become especially challenging when different organizations are associated with different tenants. This challenge exists because a single accepted simple mail transport protocol (SMTP) domain can only be registered to a single tenant at a given time. This presents significant technical obstacles for organizations that require a unified shared domain space when their users exist in different tenants.
In particular, when two or more organizations have been consolidated, it might be desirable for messages sent from user accounts that are in the domain associated with the consolidated IT infrastructure to appear as though they are still originating from the domain associated with the individual organizations before the consolidation. It also might be desirable for messages sent from user accounts that have not been migrated to the domain associated with the consolidated IT infrastructure to appear as though they are originating from the domain associated with the consolidated IT infrastructure. Existing technologies achieve these objectives by relying on SMTP servers to store and forward messages. But this technology has some disadvantages.
The disclosure describes embodiments more fully hereinafter with reference to the accompanying drawings, in which example embodiments are disclosed. This disclosure may, however, be embodied in many different forms and should not be construed as limited to the example embodiments set forth herein; rather, these embodiments are provided so that this disclosure will be thorough and complete, and will fully convey the scope of the disclosure to those skilled in the art. Like numbers refer to like, but not necessarily the same or identical, elements throughout.